


see what you've done, look where you're living

by moonbeatblues



Series: i came through the backyard, you let the garden die [1]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Landlines - Freeform, a tiny bit bc of stranger things vibes, and i'm not over episode 69 and i never will be!!!, heyo it's a vaguely modern au, join me in my sad pit, maybe human but also i always want jester to still be a tiefling in every au ya know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 20:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19472026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/moonbeatblues
Summary: “Beau?”She can hear the crack in Jester’s voice from upstairs, right down the middle, and knows who it is right away.It’s weird, how it’s not really relief, what she feels right then. The back of her skull is a wash of cold static, and it travels the length of her spine so quick she has to wait a few seconds after opening her mouth to speak.“Yeah, Jes?”Before she gets the response she’s already scrambling off the floor, tying off her hair and cracking her toes against the wood like it’s anything more than the landline, like she’ll be doing anything but trying not to cry and twisting the cord around and around her hand like how Dairon does her tape.She waits in the doorway anyways, listening to Jester sniffle and pull up a wad of tissues from the box by the microwave.“It’s Yasha.”(post-ep 69, but with landlines)





	see what you've done, look where you're living

**Author's Note:**

> i really want the scene where jester messages yasha and asks her to come home and yasha finally answers, but what i wanted even more was a cliche calling scene where both beau and jester can talk to her, so. yeah.
> 
> title is from by the venture by daniel knox!! a song that reminds me terribly of molly and yasha

“Beau?”

She can hear the crack in Jester’s voice from upstairs, right down the middle, and knows who it is right away.

It’s weird, how it’s not really relief, what she feels right then. The back of her skull is a wash of cold static, and it travels the length of her spine so quick she has to wait a few seconds after opening her mouth to speak.

“Yeah, Jes?”

Before she gets the response she’s already scrambling off the floor, tying off her hair and cracking her toes against the wood like it’s anything more than the landline, like she’ll be doing anything but trying not to cry and twisting the cord around and around her hand like how Dairon does her tape.

She waits in the doorway anyways, listening to Jester sniffle and pull up a wad of tissues from the box by the microwave.

“It’s Yasha.”

—

See, the thing is that it’s summer again.

Beau took Jester to the fair last week, maybe because Fjord never would, maybe because she’s lonely, or maybe it’s just that she could never get so low and angry she’d refuse Jester anything.

It’s not such a drive to Trostenwald, now they’re back— Jester tries to convince her to bring Nugget because she’s been training him and he’ll definitely probably be fine, but in the end they still leave him with Cad, who answers the door drowsily even though it’s 8 pm and the sun’s just setting.

And it’s not like Jester doesn’t have her license,or the money for a car, but Beau always melts right down when she pats her cheek and says she likes this just fine. Like she’d even know what to do with herself otherwise, like she’d even remember to get breakfast if Jester wasn’t with her.

It’s just easier, though. Just because finding an apartment is a nightmare in Zadash, supposedly, and because Beau already _has_ one, and it’s fine she’s only got one bedroom because the bed’s big enough _anyway,_ and the parlor’s on the way to the library _anyway_. It just makes sense.

Jester’s got an absolute death grip on her hand the second they get let through the shitty, profoundly climbable fence, steering them both over to the only part of the fair you can actually see from over the trees of the park. The big ferris wheel with the lights and the umbrellas over the seats, the one they let you stay on for way too long— something Beau only found out when she asked out that pretty girl from a few years ago, the one who kept re-renewing the big, hardcover copy of _Les Mis_ everyone else liked. She was fresh off having Tori around, okay, and wasn’t doing so hot. So not hot, in fact, that when the girl kissed her she just said “thank you.”

With Jester though she minds a whole lot less, doesn’t bother to keep wiping her hands to stop sweating because Jester just grabs one in both of hers when they pause just left of the very top, and Jester’s hands are always freezing cold anyways and the sun’s _right there_ , like a blurry red dime rolling down the jagged reliefs to the west.

“ _Beau_ ,” she whispers, like she’s not right there, like there’s anything else to look at.

She looks so pretty, mouth dropped open and all that jewelry catching fiercely on the last bit of light, and when it’s sunk halfway she sinks with it, sits back down and leans her head on Beau’s shoulder.

“I wish Yasha was here,” she doesn’t say, because saying that means something else than it used to, but it passes between them all the same. The car sways a little, since the wind’s much faster this high up and not just the lukewarm breeze breaking up the heat down below, and Jester kisses her on the cheek, right next to the corner of her mouth, when it starts moving again and she has to close her eyes for a long moment to try and sort out all the different frequencies of static in her head at the moment. The Jester one, the Yasha one, the worrying about Caleb one, the Tori one that’s tuned down so low she can only catch it right before going to sleep.

She squeezes Jester’s hand and doesn’t let up the whole way back down.

—

Jester’s already been crying, so she doesn’t bother with the pretense of _not_ running so fast she goes crashing into the kitchen island, and thank god Jester’s got one hand cupped over the receiver because the “Where is she?” just burbles up out of her chest like a long-held air pocket. Jester just shakes her head and mouths “don’t know” at her before uncovering the phone and pressing the fingertips of that hand, the acrylics, back against her lower lip and clearing her throat.

“Yeah, Beau’s here, hang on.”

And Beau just sort of freezes for a second when Jester holds the phone out, because what even is this, she’s calling now? Not when she got wherever she was going, not on Beau’s birthday, not a month ago or two or three, and she’s almost angry, angry like she was right afterwards, and almost thinks about not answering.

Except that after a few seconds she hears the tinny, infinitesimal “Beau?” pour out into the silence of the kitchen, and all of a sudden she’s nearly clawing the phone out of Jester’s hand.

She squashes the thing right against her face, Jester’s frown defocusing somewhere in the impossibly far distance beyond her head.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

She hasn’t heard Yasha cry before, but there are tears thick in that one syllable and Beau is angry, angry at Jester for probably crying first and angry at herself for not answering right away and angry at Yasha all over again for taking herself somewhere where she’s crying and not with them.

All at once it makes the fear sieve right through the soles of her feet, the fear that stacked right up into the paragraph she planned to rattle off, the one she worked out on the way into the kitchen.

“Are you okay?”

And Yasha laughs, right away, a bark like she wasn’t expecting to and fading out fast because, well, because.

“No.”

Beau just mashes the receiver closer to her mouth, trying to remember to breathe out her nose so the sound isn’t so loud.

“Where are you? We could help you. I could help you.”

Yasha laughs again, even tearier, even more ephemeral. “Far enough.”

“We can help you,” she just insists. “Please.”

“No, you can’t. You don’t know me.” Something shifts on the other end, and she gets louder. “Molly didn’t even know me. _I_ don’t know me.”

And she doesn’t want to say something so dumb as “I do know you” because it doesn’t get them anywhere, they won’t gain any ground just leaning in to the brunt of the thing. Like with Keg, but with much higher stakes.

“I know who you could be. I know who you want to be. I know who you were when you were here.”

“What if I can’t be that, though? Now that I remember.”

“Fuckin’— you still _are_ , or you wouldn’t have left.”

She says nothing.

“I don’t care if you hurt me, I can fucking take it, okay? I know you’d never hurt Jester, or Nott, because I wouldn’t, and I suck. You don’t have to be good to not do bad things, and full offense, you suck at doing bad things.”

“I didn’t use to.”

“Yeah, well, me neither.”

It’s a different laugh, now. More gravelly. The real one. “You know what?”

“What?” The shift feels like a sitting down, a relaxing. She leans one elbow on the counter and Jester shuffles around to sit in the other chair.

“I don’t even know where I am right now. It’s really dark out.”

“It’s nice here right now— the fair’s back in town. I took Jester.”

“Yeah, she told me. Is there a new tarot tent?”

It almost doesn’t hurt. It’s almost funny, now, warm and fond to talk about him again, “No, they didn’t even put anything in his usual spot.”

“Oh.” She sighs, staticky into the other receiver. “I guess it would be worse if they did.”

“Yeah.” Sensing a potential silence stretching out, Beau pushes on. “They had the candy apples you really liked from last year.”

“Mmm.”

“Jester wanted to send you, like, four billion, but I told her they wouldn’t keep, and apparently you don’t know the address, either.”

“I don’t think there is one.”

“There could be.”

“Beau—- “

“Just think about it, okay? Home isn’t here, it’s us, and we’d come out for you in a second if you asked.”

“I don’t know that I deserve to ask anymore.”

“Then just tell me where, and I’ll tell them for you. Or Jester. Then it’s not just you.”

“Maybe.”

“Just come home, Yash. Wherever you want it to be.”

Yasha hangs up.

Beau keeps holding the phone to her ear for what feels like three hours, until Jester pries it out of her hands and drops it so it’s lazily bungeeing a few inches off the tile.

“Beau,” she says, swiping her thumbs under Beau’s eyes, and she made it through the whole thing without crying but something about the return of the silence does it.

“She’ll call again.”

“I know,” Beau says, feeling hollow, and doesn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, i'm over on tumblr @seafleece !! and i have the urge to flesh this au out, because in my head their hometown is zadash and jester works in a tattoo parlor with orly and beau works at the library caleb always goes to and yasha had some serious memory repression and met everyone at the fair the previous summer with molly


End file.
